2.8 Installing MySQL from Generic Binaries on Other Unix-Like Systems

Oracle provides a set of binary distributions of MySQL. These
include binary distributions in the form of compressed
tar files (files with a
.tar.gz extension) for a number of platforms,
as well as binaries in platform-specific package formats for
selected platforms.

This section covers the installation of MySQL from a compressed
tar file binary distribution. For other
platform-specific package formats, see the other platform-specific
sections. For example, for Windows distributions, see
Section 2.3, “Installing MySQL on Microsoft Windows”.

MySQL compressed tar file binary distributions
have names of the form
mysql-VERSION-OS.tar.gz,
where VERSION is a
number (for example, 4.1.25), and
OS indicates the type of operating system
for which the distribution is intended (for example,
pc-linux-i686 or winx64).

To install MySQL from a compressed tar file
binary distribution, your system must have GNU
gunzip to uncompress the distribution and a
reasonable tar to unpack it. If your
tar program supports the z
option, it can both uncompress and unpack the file.

GNU tar is known to work. The standard
tar provided with some operating systems is not
able to unpack the long file names in the MySQL distribution. You
should download and install GNU tar, or if
available, use a preinstalled version of GNU tar. Usually this is
available as gnutar, gtar, or
as tar within a GNU or Free Software directory,
such as /usr/sfw/bin or
/usr/local/bin. GNU tar is
available from http://www.gnu.org/software/tar/.

Create a mysql User and Group

If your system does not already have a user and group for
mysqld to run as, you may need to create one. The
following commands add the mysql group and the
mysql user. The syntax for
useradd and groupadd may
differ slightly on different versions of Unix, or they may have
different names such as adduser and
addgroup.

shell> groupadd mysql
shell> useradd -r -g mysql mysql

Note

Because the user is required only for ownership purposes, not
login purposes, the useradd command uses the
-r option to create a user that does not have
login permissions to your server. Omit this option to permit
logins for the user (or if your useradd does
not support the option).

You might want to call the user and group something else instead of
mysql. If so, substitute the appropriate name in
the preceding commands and in the following steps.

Obtain and Unpack the Distribution

Pick the directory under which you want to unpack the distribution
and change location into it. The example here unpacks the
distribution under /usr/local. The
instructions, therefore, assume that you have permission to create
files and directories in /usr/local. If that
directory is protected, you must perform the installation as
root.

shell> cd /usr/local

Obtain a distribution file using the instructions in
Section 2.1.3, “How to Get MySQL”. For a given release, binary
distributions for all platforms are built from the same MySQL source
distribution.

Unpack the distribution, which creates the installation directory.
Then create a symbolic link to that directory.
tar can uncompress and unpack the distribution if
it has z option support:

The tar command creates a directory named
mysql-VERSION-OS.
The ln command makes a symbolic link to that
directory. This enables you to refer more easily to the installation
directory as /usr/local/mysql.

If your tar does not have z
option support, use gunzip to unpack the
distribution and tar to unpack it. Replace the
preceding tar command with the following
alternative command to uncompress and extract the distribution: